AWS Case Studies- DevOps: Creating Scalable IOT Infrastructure

By Flux7 Labs

February 18, 2016

AWS Case Studies: DevOps

A Fortune 500 manufacturer was using Hadoop, internal data centers, Rackspace and CenturyLink to facilitate services that connected its customers with data insights using an Internet of Things model. The overarching goal: to facilitate continuous data-driven improvement within its customers’ operations. To help achieve this goal and overcome its Hadoop scaling issues, the company engaged with Flux7, DevOps consulting group and AWS partners. Additionally, the manufacturer sought a global solution that would comply with EU data privacy laws.

Solution:

Understanding the organization’s scaling challenges and need for EU data privacy compliance, Flux7 recommended the organization approach the project with DevOps best practices, executed on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. The Flux7 recommendation meant the company needed to migrate to AWS for which Flux7’s experienced consultants were able to provide education, guidance and comparison of AWS with other solutions to ease the decision.

Under the guidance of Flux7’s AWS cloud architecture experts and certified consultants, the manufacturer’s internal teams were able to quickly understand what could be done to enable rapid setup of AWS IoT infrastructure. Moving forward, Flux7 and the customer brainstormed and co-invented a DevOps workflow that is agile, leverages AWS and Ansible, while maintaining tight AWS security controls that simultaneously meet EU data privacy laws.

Flux7 used this opportunity to add additional features to the company’s internal toolchain and support legacy application modernization by migrating the application onto AWS. Specifically, Flux7’s unique approach to dynamically assigning DNS names to machines in an AWS Autoscaling Group (ASG) enabled legacy application migration onto AWS that required hard-coded DNS names.

While already an agile organization, Flux7’s deep experience with DevOps approaches provided an additional layer of IT process automation that further propelled the company’s time to delivery.

For example, the organization’s Mongo admin team had not automated the process for setting up a Mongo DB cluster because it did not happen often enough to warrant it in the prior environment.

However, by setting up infrastructure as code, Flux7 was able to decrease the time for server procurement to mere minutes. To fully enable the Mongo team to take advantage of this level of automation with the infrastructure, Flux7 setup scripts for bootstrapping a Mongo DB cluster.

The result: a process which initially took the DB admin days, was reduced to 15 minutes.

Benefits:

The manufacturer’s competitive advantage revolves around its IoT strategy and the ability to seamlessly connect its customers with data insights via technology. This trusted company was able to create a premiere AWS solution to do just this, allowing its customers to connect and share expertise based on data sent from its machinery to the cloud, data that allows its customers to improve quality and productivity in real time. Flux7 DevOps consulting experts helped guide this global manufacturing company to a solution that allows it to stream, analyze, store and share data collected by thousands of machines in a secure, EU data compliant cloud architecture.